Artist: Amy Hui Li

Amy Hui Li’s first solo exhibition with Unit is a deeply personal exploration of materiality, fragility and emotion. Balanced between painting and sculpture, paradise lost narrates the process of falling apart and coming back together again.

Immediately evocative of John Milton’s epic poem, the exhibition’s title reconsiders ideas of sin and grace in a contemporary context. In this sense, Li looks also to the song of the same name – ‘paradise lost/ 失乐园’ written by the Cantonese lyricist Wyman Wong and performed by the Hong Kong based band, Grasshopper – which encapsulates the dichotomy of everyday existence in a world that is cruel and strange, yet also exciting and wondrous. Each painting delves into Li’s personal experiences of struggle and reparation and, in doing so, exposes her inner self and a version of her own ‘paradise lost.’

Since completing her academic journey a year ago, Li’s visual language has shifted and developed. The exhibition sees her layer oil paint into her mixed media works, honouring her strong connection to painting. The artist’s use of colour is a key thread that weaves its way throughout paradise lost and her practice more broadly. Her signature use of red is unveiled in full force, expressing the burning intensity of the present moment and the negative emotions of pain and sorrow. However, Li is constantly aware of the alternative connotations of the colour red, which, for some, signifies ideas of passion and love.

The artwork, i’m burning for no one, pictures shades of red that churn and swirl together to evoke a tumult of emotions. Through a carefully considered title, the painting upends traditional expectations of passion, exploring an abstract yearning or anticipation for someone who might not even be in the conscious mind yet. The colour blue has also taken on a more prominent role in Li’s artworks. Where red represents the present moment, blue evokes notions of memory and nostalgia. In the painting, a mix tape of every sound that exists, a deep blue encroaches on swathes of red, reminiscent of foggy clouds of memory that seep into the present. Often inspired by certain songs or smells, Li’s canvases are more concerned with emotional memories rather than specific visual recollections.

paradise lost continues Li’s exploration of materiality, presenting a new series of mixed media works that hover on the boundary between painting and sculpture. Li layers felt and organza with oil paints to construct her ethereal pieces, lending them a relief-like quality as various textures and forms swell from the picture plane. The use of organza in place of traditional canvas materials symbolises ideas of honesty and bravery. The innately delicate materials mirror the artist’s vulnerability, a metaphor which developed during her time at university and grew into pictorial explorations of hidden emotion. The transparency of the organza, which reveals the typically concealed stretcher bars of the canvas underneath, evokes the idea of an X-ray. Like an open window, the organza allows the viewer to peer through the artist’s outer skin to see those emotions that are often kept hidden.

These ideas are taken further in artworks like extracted delight. In a more visceral example of interiority, the canvas has been torn violently to reveal a gaping hole. Inspired by a series of paintings by Anish Kapoor that used overlapping forms of red silicone and torn canvas, Li rips into her artworks in a process that is closely tied to her own body and emotions. Recalling open wounds and pumping blood vessels, these canvases visualise the painful memories and scars that have shaped the artist’s life. At the same time, however, the act of destruction is cathartic for Li whose use of material is almost cleansing. She uses her hands to tear, colour, reshape and stitch pieces of felt onto her canvases. Elements of accident find their way into each piece as the felt leaves traces of colour in unpredictable ways. The repetitive motion of ripping and reforming is a seemingly paradoxical practice that, for Li, mirrors the full circle process of healing.

It is difficult for Li to put a name to many of the emotions explored in paradise lost and, in many ways, it is perhaps unproductive for her to do so. There is an innate ambiguity to these artworks that consider the traces of emotional memory through abstract form and bold use of colour. For Li, it is important not to pin down specificity, but to allow these artworks to speak universally so that each of us may discover something personal.